Speaking skills are critical in a rapidly changing work landscape that requires collaboration and problem solving. However, class size (small or large) can influence students’ feelings and behaviors when practicing speaking in class, with this study finding that total class size affects students’ outcomes not only during student presentations to the whole class but also during students’ small group interactions. Students in a small class reported feeling more positive about their experiences within the class as a whole, experiencing greater interest in coursework and exhibiting greater attention.
Tag: active learning
Active Learning Experiences to Address Student Well-Being
Well-being plays a critical role in student performance and engagement. The purpose of this pilot study is to describe an active and experiential learning activity and examine its effect on promoting well-being in a convenience sample of graduate students. The results of this study demonstrated that the active and experiential learning opportunities described in this article enhanced perceived well-being, including mental, emotional, and physical health. Findings from this study suggest that active and experiential learning approaches may be beneficial tools for addressing and promoting well-being for graduate students.
Think Aloud Videos and Assessment in an Introductory Economics Class for Undergraduate Students
This paper demonstrates the value of an innovative test preparation strategy, applied over multiple semesters to one principles of macroeconomics class. The professor makes a video of himself taking a copy of the test students are preparing for, talking aloud about how to think about the question and work through the solution. A natural experiment occurred one semester when the professor was unable to provide the think-aloud preparation video, but other, standard preparation materials were in place. It is demonstrated that students increase their scores on other questions in the same modules by an average of 7.6 percentage points with think-aloud videos. Think aloud interventions are shown to be an effective tool to enhance student content learning.
New Superheroes/Villain Characters for Teaching Engineering Materials Selection
Superhero themes have been increasingly used in the teaching of a range of topics including business, humanities and science in recent years. Typically, characters from existing popular media are adopted for the teaching activities. On the other hand, customised characters that are developed from scratch allow the educator to have more control of the characters’ features so that the learning objectives can be achieved more effectively. In this work, new fictitious characters have been created as cases for students to perform their engineering materials selection assignment. The motivation for using the superhero theme was to increase the students’ excitement in the assignment. This paper shares the approach taken and the teaching experience after running the superhero theme with two cohorts of students.